The invention is a new method for organizing information, and a novel data processing system and method for presenting information so organized for an online research and writing system for professionals.
Research by professionals and other specialists is largely conducted online, through specialized services that provide access to information pertaining to particular areas of knowledge. These services offer enormous advantages over reliance on printed materials, chiefly because they provide easy access to a larger and more up-to-date body of material.
The principal tools now available for finding particular information within the databases of these services are the same tools that anyone might use to search a large mass of largely unorganized documents in any database or on the Internet: word searches, including Boolean and “natural language” searches, and cross-references between documents that cite, or are cited by, each other. Lawyers, for example, often rely on Westlaw or LexisNexis to conduct legal research. A typical search begins with a complex Boolean search of a large database, such as of case law within a particular jurisdiction. The researcher then browses the results, reads some of the cases, and follows hyperlinks within them to other documents, such as to previously decided cases and to statutes. The online services also offer tools for searching for documents that cite a particular case or other document.
These search tools often prove unsatisfactory for professionals because of the large mass of unhelpful documents that even a well-constructed search may return. (A poorly constructed search could return even more unhelpful documents or, alternatively, exclude helpful documents.) This problem is more severe for professionals and other specialists than for general researchers, for two main reasons. First, in comparison with specialists, general researchers tend to seek answers to simpler questions, and questions that can be more clearly defined in advance. The simpler and better-defined the question, the more feasible it is to construct a search that will return primarily documents that address the question. Second, although general researchers searching large databases or the Internet may, like specialists, face voluminous search results, less time is lost wading through the results because there is less need for precision. For example, if for general or personal reasons one seeks to learn the population of Geneva, Switzerland, one can type “population Geneva Switzerland” into an Internet search engine, such as Google or Yahoo!. The number of links returned will be enormous—over two million for each of these engines. Among the first several, however, the researcher will come upon a reasonably trustworthy source reporting that the population is roughly 180,000. At that point the research is complete. A professional, in contrast, often needs not just any expression of the answer, but the best expression of it. A lawyer seeking an answer to a legal question, for example, often seeks the particular case that answers the question most definitively, or most specifically, as it applies to a client's problem. For this reason, a lawyer will often slog through hundreds of search results even after discovering with near certainty the answer to the question posed.
One way to increase a researcher's efficiency is to provide access to similar research that has previously been conducted by others, such as research contained in secondary sources. Existing research systems for professionals do provide some tools by which the researcher can make use of prior research on the same subject to point the researcher to documents more likely to be useful. For example, Westlaw and LexisNexis provide electronic versions of legal treatises that contain hyperlinks to major cases that answer certain questions. Case law researchers on Westlaw can also limit their searches of documents citing a particular case to those documents that cite a particular statement (a “Headnote”) within a case, or to those documents that state a disagreement with the case or with a statement in the case. (Westlaw accomplishes this by integrating case Headnotes into a larger taxonomy that it calls the “West Key Number” system.) LexisNexis has a similar service.
As these tools exemplify, certain bodies of information available through professional research services, though large, are sufficiently limited and heavily enough used that it is economically feasible to process the material and classify it substantively to ease the task of researchers. In fact, a wealth of research that could be of potential use to online researchers is already conducted—in the legal field, for example, by those who maintain legal treatises—but is not made available. This research is not available because there is at present no effective means to organize and present it in a way that would maximize the efficiency of subsequent research.
What is needed is a system and method for electronically collecting, organizing, and presenting information pertaining to a particular body of knowledge, that will allow professionals and other specialists to find answers to complex questions quickly and efficiently on the basis of prior research conducted by other professionals, both outside and inside their organizations.
What is also needed is a way to incorporate research results automatically into a written document during the course or research. None of the existing research services for professionals includes an automatic writing component.